This invention relates to a method and associated apparatus, for producing commercially-acceptable paged material stored on microfiche cards and reproduced on hard copy on an office-type microprint copier or duplicator.
The idea of micro-photographing and storing paged material to be reproduced subsequently only on demand is not new. Where small quantities of, e.g., books are desired, the idea of using a microform to hard copy device, such as an office microprint copier, has been proposed. The difficulty is in producing books which are commerically acceptable, and are not obvious copies. A major problem is aligning the print areas to have approximately the same margins, as do commercially printed books. This has been practically unattainable when using a microprint copier, because of image positioning variables introduced in (a) micro-photographing the pages to produce the microform frames; (b) positioning the microform frame in its holder relative to the optical imaging path of the copier; and (c) reverse-side copying, or duplexing, to produce the desired book effect. Slight spatial imaging variations in any of the above steps result in relatively large, generally unacceptable print-margin offsets from page to page of the reproduced paged material.